Fancy Kitchen in Canada: - Open Documents
Fancy Kitchen in Canada
A report on 20th century industrial design for domestic appliances
(Refrigerators, Toasters, Kettles and Coffee Makers)
Scope of Work
This is a commissioned research primarily intended to support collection development of domestic appliances at Canada Science and Technology Museum. Industrial Design is an important interpretative approach applied to this collection and currently not covered by historical assessments.
With regards to industrial design, this study briefly discusses its pertinent links to technology, material and visual culture, gender and class issues in the 20th century. It contains a timeline which names important events which (may) have influenced the history of industrial design in Canada. It lists major trends and turning points in the design of kitchen appliances such as: refrigerators, toasters, kettles, and coffee makers, along with identifying possible items for further acquisition. As well, the study records some resources relevant to curatorial research which refer to industrial design of domestic kitchen appliances in Canada. It offers a selected bibliography of books, articles, popular magazines, trade literature, websites, and a collection of data on Canadian industrial designers and/or companies for which they designed products. This paper also identifies further needed research, besides stressing the importance of adding to the data enclosed herewith.
I would like to acknowledge the help provided by subscribers of H-Canada listserv who commented on the topic, offered pertinent information relating to the location of archives, collections and supplementary sources, and made recommendations of additional literature and further avenues of research.
Methodology
The industrial design of kitchen appliances in Canada has rarely been addressed in peer review literature. This study provides a short literature review of books and articles which touch on the subject of industrial design, while its main methodology relies on an examination of period advertisements for domestic appliances, available in trade literature[1] or in edited volumes such as Jim Heinmann’s All-American Ads (see the various decades in bibliography). During the 20th century, printed advertisements boosted consumerism in North America by combining the up-to-date-ness of technology with the visual appeal of object design. Modifications in advertising concepts were in part due to the advancement in printing technology (from introducing color as modern feature – “cult of the new”, to juxtaposing lettering to hand-drawings, to computer-generated images etc.) and in part to a complex transformation of the class-based society into a rather classless one. In North America, this commercial approach started in strong relation to Victorian aesthetics (where keeping appearances was a virtue) and gradually turned the ‘visual’ into the only reality that is (in the line of “what you see is what you get”).
This methodology also allows to more accurately date artefacts in the CSTM collection whose dates are either unclear or missing, since the objects are easily identifiable by their look (shape, dimensions, material, and sometimes colour) in period advertisements from the trade literature.
Literature review
A number of publications explore housework and kitchen appliances in North America; most of these pertain to the U.S. and give references of various degrees on social history, gender, technologies and design.
Susan Strasser (1982) provides an excellent account on American household technology and the ideas about housework which spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is heavily illustrated with period photos which give a good visual description of household chores and the technologies women have used, as well as period advertisements, images of stores, manufacturing plants, cartoons etc.
Around the same time, Ruth Cowan-Swartz wrote her classic book More Work for Mother (1983) which discusses the “ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave” in the context of industrialization in America. More recently, Elizabeth Collins Cromley (2010) investigates the “food axis” as a partnership between spaces in a house which are involved in the production, storage and consumption of food. Cromley’s is an architectural social history of American houses, but many of the concepts she explains may be used in conjunction with Peter Ward’s History of Domestic Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home (1999) to figure out a “food axis” for the Canadian houses (no such research has yet been undertaken).
Popular magazines have been very influential during the twentieth century in creating a consumers’ market, especially by means of their articles and by publishing advertising targeting a specific readership, namely a growing middle class. Valerie Korinek’s extensive study of Chatelaine magazine in the 1950s and 1960s explains that Canadian women were generally more critical then their American counterparts with regards to issues relating both to the household and the world outside the home, even if most of them were, like in America, housewives. Canadians made informed choices and, in accordance to Parr’s viewpoint, bought goods in moderation as they were mainly opposed to the idea of credit purchasing (this extended from small appliances to house purchase). Kitchen appliances were featured massively in postwar ads as dream-objects desired by brides or housewives to make their life easier and happier. Similar advertisements may be found in the pages of other popular magazines such as Maclean’s, Canadian Homes (& Gardens) and Canadian Home Journal – no other comprehensive study of any of those magazines has yet been written.
Joy Parr (1999) offers an excellent account on Canadian domestic goods, albeit only for the postwar years: she discusses the vision of modern domesticity which emerged immediately after the Second World War and how the modern “international” style influenced the search for a national one in a cultural-economic context when Canada tried to detach itself from British domination while becoming more and more attuned to American products. Parr asserts that “in the postwar period, household goods were shaped by political processes and ethical judgements as much as by entrepreneurial imperatives and technological opportunities”. Part 2 focus on Design is of special interest for the present study, as well as the last sub-chapter “A caution of excess” of part 3.
Lerner and Williamson (1991) provide a good survey on existing literature; volume 2 of their work is the index, which has many entries on advertising (see page 36). As the Fine Arts Bibliographer in the York University Libraries, Williamson had collected trade cards and the annuals of the Art Directors Club of Toronto (1949-1970s), as well as international cards which often included Canadian references.[2]
For the emerging role of industrial designers as mediators in the context of a developing consumer culture, see Penny Sparke (1998) and Jeffrey Meikle’s book Twentieth Century Limited (1979), though he does not discuss gender of class relationships in the tug-of-war between male designers (usually part of an elite) and female consumers (of all classes). Rachel Gotlieb and Cora Golden offer an overall look at Design in Canada (2004) in the second half of the twentieth century. They explain how Canadian designers used new materials such as aluminium and plastics – along with new technologies to shape these materials into different forms – to foster modernistic principles in the first postwar decades. Government grants and awards from organizations such as the National Industrial Design Council promoted products ranging from furniture to electronics to household appliances. The 1960s space-age and the pop culture of the 1970s, coupled with an increasingly globally-oriented market rebelled against modernist rigidity and brought pluralism into the picture. Gotlieb and Golden dedicate an essay to small appliances, which has illustrations and basic information on a variety of kettles and coffee makers, helpful in the process of future acquisitions for the CSTM collection.
Shelley Nickels’ article in Technology and Culture (Oct 2002) is a detailed account on the early days of refrigerator design in America. She argues that industrial design was central to manufacturers’ struggles to redefine the refrigerator from an expensive luxury item for the wealthy few to an affordable, laborsaving, food preservation device for a broad market of ‘servantless housewives’. The economical, technological and aesthetic factors which influenced refrigerators’ design were the first steps towards creating the homogeneous (‘average’) vision of the ‘modern streamlined kitchen’ as an icon of progress in the making of a middle-class society (which had started in the 1930s and peaked in the 1950s). Considering that Canadians imported and used American refrigerators, this article is most relevant for this present study. No such studies exist for small appliances, but Nickles’ argument may serve as a base for further investigations.
Please refer to the bibliography section of this report for additional sources.
Industrial design of domestic appliances
There are a few themes which generally pertain to industrial design of domestic appliances in Canada and which help situate it in the national, North American and international contexts. These themes are found at the intersection of Canadian history, history of household technology and food production/consumption, considerations of gender and class (bordered by mentions of different period life-styles), modernism and reactions to modernism, as well as the advertising industry and consumerism. Specific references may then be made respectively in the study of big appliances and small appliances, particularly when it comes to relations which can be drawn between appliance design and other relevant industries: for instance, refrigerators should be discussed in relation to the automobile industry, since the two products share similar technologies,[3] while small appliances invite accounts of war-deriving technologies and/or ideologies (Second World War and Cold War). This study touches chronologically on some of these aspects.
The twentieth century saw big economic and social transformations in Canada. A former dominion of the United Kingdom, coupled with a big area of French-based culture (Quebec), and facing a growing influence of continuously flowing immigrant communities from countries world-wide, Canada has struggled to define its national identity for the past century. Juxtaposed on the intersection of British, French and various other immigrant-culture values was Canadians’ growing attachment to American economic values, defined as they were by a politics of standardization[4] which influenced (and was in turn manipulated by) social levelling. When comparing the US and Canada, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries show a few decades delay between the latter and former with regard to technological developments and change in social-economic structures, a gap which has gradually shrunk towards the beginning of the twenty-first century. A separate survey of US companies (producers and distributors of electrical appliances) operating in Canada in the 19th, 20th and 21st century, along with a survey of Canadian-based similar companies would help determine important milestones and influences in design.
Studies which relate Canadian national identity to Canadian design are yet to be written. An interesting case which commands attention is that surrounding the “Buy Canadian” crusade launched in 1958 by the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, which dispensed maple leaf tags to Canadian companies and staged displays at Eaton’s and other major retailers. Given this campaign happened seven years earlier than the adoption of Canada’s national flag (the Maple Leaf flag), and keeping in mind the related fierce national debate spanning a few issues of the Maclean’s magazine,[5] a legitimate question emerges: how influential was this campaign – as a market-driven endeavour – on the adoption of the maple leaf as the essential Canadian symbol?
Changes in the design of domestic appliances are strongly correlated with changes in life-styles throughout the twentieth century. As electricity became readily available, appliances which used electricity lent an increasingly big hand in domestic affairs such as food preparation, food storage, cleaning, washing etc. In the case of wealthier people, they replaced servants; in households of lower financial means, they became the helper which housewives had never had. Little wonder then that appliances were advertised as “electric servants” which allowed the gradual elimination of ‘washing’ or ‘baking’ days (washing machines and stoves) and saved hours of daily shopping (refrigerators kept food fresh for longer periods). Given their size and correlated prices, smaller appliances were more affordable in the beginning (1920s), yet refrigerators quickly caught up in the 1930s.[6] In the postwar period, although this ‘liberation’ from household duties came in contrast to a strongly advertised middle-class housewife figure, it nevertheless progressively permitted women to enter the work-force and become working-women (who have still juggled home and work hours to this day). The aspect of these material ‘servants’ was progressively transformed from primarily functional apparatus to visually appealing objects with which users could establish personal relationships. The appliances studied for this report had users of both genders and were not primarily used by women in the household/kitchen (like stoves or washing machines, for example). In the postwar period, refrigerators start being advertised as a ‘family’ of products for the ‘family’ of users: again, this hinted at relationships between objects and humans in the postwar North American material culture.[7]
Entertaining and leisure are important aspects which underlined middle-class culture in North America and which also influenced product design, spanning most decades of the twentieth century. An example from 1927 declares: “Entertaining becomes a pleasure with the dependable assistance of Frigidaire. Unexpected callers or long-planned-for guests are alike served the perfect foods that come from this treasure chest of the modern kitchen.”[8] Thirty years later, a brochure for the Leonard Refrigerator juxtaposes images of the fridge and of leisure and vacationing.[9]
Electric appliances transformed cooking, (food) storage, the kitchen space and, by extension, the home. Elaborate brochures from the 1920s include presentations of refrigerator models, along with advice on caring for the appliance, and recipes for dishes to be included in a variety of meals; interestingly, the images accompanying these types of meals show a high formality and speak of a ‘middle-class’ life-style closer to the higher end of the class spectrum.[10] Such images introduced a ‘desired’ life-style to people in lower classes ad they became part of advertisements luring consumers into buying appliances with the promise that they too will be able to entertain in high style. New recipes appeared, adapted to the new technologies.[11] As American industrialization and urbanization transformed food into a commodity, pre-war mass-production and mass-distribution of packaged food expanded in the postwar fully prepared / frozen meals and fast-food restaurants.[12] Traditional pantries and food storage space at the back of the kitchen gradually disappeared[13] and in the postwar period the modern open-concept plan was widely adopted in North America (simultaneously in the US and Canada):[14] industrial designers responded by giving appliances an increasing visual appeal, since such objects were not only on constant display for family members and guests alike but, like houses, they were also directly connected to a ‘pride of ownership’ in the middle-class culture.
It is important to note the association between product design and product name in creating the ‘image’ of the product. For refrigerators, names such as De Luxe, Tudor, Royal, Cadillac, or New Yorker express a ‘high-class style’ which is inherently attractive and, along with a competitive price, becomes affordable to lower classes. In addition, the socialistic ethos of modernism paradoxically helped with the product ‘image’ construction since designers embraced new technologies and materials as the key to modernism. In the early postwar period, they renounced the imitative styles of the 1940s, when radios could look like pyramids or toasters, and adopted an opposite approach: “for the new materials to seem modern, the thinking of the day was that they had to avoid imitation.”[15] This is not completely surprising since modernism has trumpeted the breaking with tradition and a constant renewal of “forms [which] followed function.”
The war had a great say in this change. Before the Second World War, appliances were made of materials such as steel, white enamel and even aluminium, which were advertised primarily in relation to health-benefits (“super-health aluminium guarantee better health”). Although aluminium, plastic and moulded plywood had been invented before the war, significant technical advances developed for a variety of military uses made them seem new and revolutionary.[16] With regards to the appliances industry, aluminium and plastic (polymers) were light, strong and malleable materials which made them ideal for mass production. Lightweight aluminium could be processed in a multitude of ways and the techniques used influenced the look of the design.[17] Conversely, polypropylene (a new type of plastic developed in the postwar period) was more heat resistant and permitted brighter colours, which determined changes in design, especially for small appliances.
Designers experimented with these technologies and the resulting objects brought along the promise of a ‘bright beautiful tomorrow’ as they were “years ahead”, “femineered”, “exclusive”, while embodying ‘up-to-date-ness’, ‘perfection’, ‘miracle’.[18] Because it has proven to be the best marketing strategy, ‘newness’ – as a continuous break with previous models – is still employed today to sell products across markets world-wide. This brings into discussion the role of advertisements in the changing of appliance design throughout the twentieth century.
Advertisements as story-tellers
“American advertising has never been more sumptuous than during the years between 1900 and 1919, when decorative typography and ornate compositions targeted a new consumer class caught in the vortex of the twentieth-century progress” argues Steven Heller in the introduction to the edited collection of All-American Ads, 1900-1919. In its early days, advertising was an indispensable commercial art geared to upper classes, promoted product mythology and pushed aesthetic ideals for the first time. They introduced iconic images and narrative tableaux which spun elaborate visual tales of perfection and absolute necessity.[19] Personal hygiene was advertised as a secular virtue, and directly related to health issues was another virtue: that of eating well. While refrigerators were shown as best storage solutions as they keep food fresh for longer periods, small appliances appeared in picnic images advertising for cars,[20] in store catalogues and in promotional material of electric goods companies.[21]
The 1920s saw an economic boom and a cultural transformation of America as it became an increasing global power. A newly sophisticated consumer class forced advertisers to appeal to public’s intelligence. The 1925 Éxposition Internationale des Art Décoratifs et Industriels Modèrne in Paris, France was a very influential international event in promoting ‘visual’ in connection with ‘new’/modern. Although the U.S. did not participate as a country,[22] one of its citizens Earnest Elmo Calkins (1868-1964) visited it and came back to introduce the “styling the goods” concept in US advertising. Two years later, the Canadian Manufacturer's Association and municipal booster organizations like the Chamber of Commerce jointly hosted an exhibition in Hamilton, Ontario: “Produced in Canada” (also called “Made in Canada” in some sources and years) received over 90,000 visitors and it is worth investigating how Canadian goods were advertised at this venue and if it related in any way to the exhibition in Paris.[23]
Based on French cubism, futurism and suprematism, Art-Deco took flight in North America, drawing consumers’ eyes with a vortex of illusion. Modernistic art forms were employed as symbols of progress and advertisements promoted “attitude” along with selling the actual products. Advertising agencies hired more designers and illustrators and full colour supported the cult of the ‘new’. While ads continued to emphasize health issues (showing cleaner kitchens and big appliances as ‘silent partners’), appliances were shown as both ‘useful and attractive’ and the first hints of relationships between humans and objects appeared: “Does the home you love love you?” This new type of commercial advertising increased sales, triggered greater production and over-stimulated economy, which was one of the factors eventually leading to the Great Depression.
Earnest Calkins’ introduction of the new ‘economic class’ as “people of taste” enhanced the product design approach. The appearance of objects became more and more important in the 1930s, and advertisers worked hard at creating the “magical” atmosphere of a product by its visual appeal. “Style” was a means by which commonplace objects (refrigerators, toasters etc.) were presented against dynamic patterns and at skewed angles to create a ‘modern aura’. Values were ‘supreme’: precision and control were part of this aura (for instance, refrigerators had built-in thermometers which “tell you exactly how cold it is”); “engineers and designers” of appliances had 20 years record of excellence.[24] America’s response to a major crisis of dire material scarcity was a complete denial: advertisements and movies kept spirits and consumers’ confidence up during Depression and instilled a sense of optimism by artificially stimulating American consumerism with words such as ‘need to have’, ‘joy’, ‘easy’, ‘modern’, ‘automatic’, ‘complete’, ‘beautifully styled’, ‘new standard’, ‘saves food, saves time, saves money.’ Artistic advertising was a democratizing force which shaped the psychology of the middle classes.
There are no studies on the advertising industry in Canada at the time. One hypothesis with regard to Canada’s postwar gradual embrace of American-type consumerism is that American products were advertised and bought in Canada (not at the same magnitude though) prior to the Second World War, that they continued to be so during the war (since most Canadian industries stop producing household items and gear their production to war-related products and buyers purchased mainly American items which were then imported) and that at the end of the war, the promise of a ‘bright tomorrow’ which could be achieved ‘today’ inevitably conquered ground in Canada. Joy Parr argues that in the postwar years Canadians were still slow at changing their frugal ways, but that technology was nevertheless welcome in many households as it lent that helpful hand with domestic chores.[25] Reversion of wartime industries to domestic production meant that new materials developed during the war could be used to give new forms to these helpful objects around the household. In the afore-mentioned search for a national identity, and detachment from Britain and America, Canadian designers started making a name for themselves with government support (grants, awards etc.) There appears to be an interesting connection (again, unexplored) between advertising and the design of products: for example, designer Fred Moffat made advertisements for Canadian General Electric while also designing products for them. It is interesting to investigate how product design and advertisement influenced each other in the visual quest to conquer customers.
During the war years, posters focused on propaganda and population’s necessary efforts to win the war. In bringing back normal routines of life and family, and in unleashing years of consumer longing in all its material and social manifestations, the advertisements of the 1950s focused on aesthetics, joy and abundance. Domestic appliances were directly associated with new beginnings of ‘real’ life, since they were advertised as desired wedding gifts rather than, as in an advertisement from 1937, Christmas gifts from Santa. Not only ‘tomorrow’ was ‘today’, but ‘magic’ was ‘real’. What gave housewives the power to perform ‘magic’? Domestic appliances: they built on the pre-war values and, both in function (technology) and form (design), they embodied perfection.
The vortex whirled on and in the 1960s it dragged people all the way to the moon. This was the decade of total anti-establishment, of resentment of modernist conformity: funnily, it beat modernism at its own game by proposing a yet ‘newer’ status quo. A young generation rebelled against their parents’ and the freewheeling aesthetic of the times included the vibrant colours of psychotropic/drug-induced trances, a casual, sexualized and libertine character and a liberal testing of structural limits. Add to that the promise of conquering the whole Universe, and no wonder that Canadian Pop culture had finally caught up with the American dream: advertisements of the era promoted space-age styling of an illusory nature, while object design gravitated around futuristic imagery. However, the popular spherical forms were as much due to the optimistic space travel age, as to the focus on the atom[26] and the power of nuclear energy, which hides the dark connotation of the Cold War conflict in the background. In Canada, the notorious event which is yet to be explored in its fullness was Expo’67 in Montreal.
What could be newer than the Universe then? In the 1970s, the rejection of the modernist aesthetic continued and it gave rise to the highly inventive design vocabulary of post-modernism: a cacophonous combination of elements which emphasized the generic, bland, corporate, too predictable modernism. Designers in big Canadian cities like Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver who had already established their names in the industry started experimenting broadly with form and palette.[27] As public awareness of prestige design increased, fuelled by conspicuous consumption and the further globalization of the design marketplace, the aesthetics of the 1970s carried on into the 1980s with a celebration of tradition, both real and invented, and a return to decoration and exaggerated use of historical imagery. The 1980s is known as the ‘designers’ decade’ as famous architects like Michael Graves in America start designing appliances for mass-production. Although Raymond Loewy had been doing that for a few decades (and had become an illustrious designer), what Graves does – by adopting this attitude – is going the other way around. While Loewy had made a name for himself by designing objects, Graves imprints his already famous name to object design and fulfills the promise for the “democratization of design” and the affordability of (designer) high-style.
The worldwide recession of the late 1980s, coupled with the fall of communism in the Soviet Block saw a rise of pluralism,[28] as well as a shift in designers’ searches towards vernacular and regional forms for inspiration; some designers made fun references in the forms they design. Since the 1990s, Computer Aid Design has permitted organic styles and greater flexibility, by reducing the number of cumbersome production steps – yet, despite greater accuracy and consistency, the downside is a certain sameness to designs. Global markets and the new mobility (increased digital communication, worldwide travel) amplify the general cacophony of the last two decades. In a multi-cultural society, objects’ reference is drawn either from cultural identity (there is a design of personal expression) or remains attached to generic forms which sell well. An interesting point to be made is the dependence on programming codes for appliances[29] and, by implication to design, the programming panels incorporated in the appliance design, either apparent or hidden.[30]
Briefing on appliances chosen for this study
Refrigerator design
These big appliances made their first appearance in America around the half of the nineteenth century. Initially, they were primarily advertised for their function (storage capacity) and in relation to the developing awareness of health issues of the period, as food lasts longer if refrigerated. Ice deliveries were regular in urban areas by 1850 and people could refrigerate the products which they grew in their backyards. For use in households of various incomes, home economists like Catherine Beecher suggested converting a barrel into an inexpensive substitute for the “superior” manufactured fridge.[31]
By the beginning of the 20th century, American industrialization and urbanization had transformed food into a commodity: mass-production and mass-distribution of packaged food was readily available. Americans living in urban areas became increasingly dependent on industrial products as consumers, rather than producers of their own food. In the 1920s, advertisements for refrigerators emphasize the health aspect regarding the preservation of foods; ‘beautifully equipped kitchens excites the admiration of guests”.[32] The storage aspect was directly related and fridge dimensions grew gradually, influencing design of both interior and exterior. The white colour, along with steel exteriors and non-porous interior surfaces are design features which speak of hygiene importance in the era.
An “Architect’s Handbook of Electric Refrigeration” in 1928 introduced designers to both principles of refrigeration and gave plan solutions for placing refrigerators in modern kitchens.[33] In the 1930s, refrigerators were advertised for “new standards of beauty, styling and convenience.” ‘Before’ and ‘After’ pictures compare old-fashioned kitchens to new ones equipped with refrigerators: in old ones, “hundreds of lost hours” spent crossing and re-crossing the kitchen result in “lost youth and beauty, and impaired health.”[34] New Deal electrification and loan policies in the mid 1930s extended the potential market for mechanical refrigerators, and forced the leading producer, Frigidaire, to “abandon its outdated notion of the refrigerator as a prestige product for an elite consumer” and the focus shifted on the “average consumer in the middle of the market.”[35] This had a direct influence on refrigerator design, as Frigidaire had to determine the size and design of a product of ‘universal appeal’, most desired by this ‘average consumer’ and use it to create a standard for the entire product line; from this standard, “models would be then differentiated by price and features, as consumers ‘stepped-up’ from the ‘stripped’ or ‘nude’ models.”[36]
The 1935 models which have the compressor on top of the refrigerator derive their design from the icebox, but women did not like the mechanical look and inconvenience of design.[37] Interestingly, when designers surveyed the market to identify preferences etc., they interviewed ‘average’ women who conformed to this profile: white, mostly middle-class background, servantless, of a moderate income, living in a single-family home in a suburban or urban neighbourhood. This profile had started to emerge more significantly as consumers, however, it left out many potential customers who did not fit this pattern. Product design thus responded to an imagined average and – through the sales realized – in turn help create the middle-class society image which would become symbolic for the postwar American (and, by extension, Canadian) market.
Lurelle Guild was a designer who had personally undertaken such surveys and used them to design refrigerators for Norge Corporation. Based on the argument that the servantless woman spent much time in the kitchen, Guild eliminated purely functional elements associated with the icebox (such as the protruding cabinet cover and heavy hardware, also the cooling coil on the top), and gave the refrigerator a smoother appearance, with fewer joints, pressed steel panels, a base made from a single piece rather than 4 legs and side panels with rounded edges (a ‘feminine’ design).[38] The 1933 GE design had a flat-top which gave more shelving room and was easier to clean.
This approach became known as the ‘streamline style’, a design which flourished from the early 1930s through into the 1950s. Its most important characteristics are the closed, streamlined forms that strongly suggest speed, symbolic of the dynamism of modern times. To visualise this, the sharp corners and transitions of objects were rounded off; knobs, handles and hand grips were recessed; speed lines were created by introducing ribs or gleaming chrome strips. The style promised consumers that they were still on the way to a glorious future with prosperity for everybody, at least if they continued to consume. The streamline style was not arrived at on the basis of scientific requirements for optimal air flow, but was a clichéd expression of that. There was a good deal of theatricality to these visual devices as they were applied to toasters, vacuum cleaners, objects which – except for the occasional domestic altercation – were not meant to fly through the air. Thus, irrespective of their function or content, objects were made attractive and tempting in a way that everyone understood. It was a period in which mass consumption was uncritically embraced.[39] Shelley Nickels argues:
“Streamlining succeeded only after designers modified modernism from the avant-garde to the average. Streamlining, as employed in household appliances, was modern in that the forms rejected domesticity as that was historically constructed; refrigerators were not decorated with applied ornament derived from aristocratic models. European avant-garde modernists, typified by the Bauhaus, had sought to apply the functionalist design logic of the engineer, gendered male, to the design of the domestic sphere. The GE monitor-top expressed its function as a modern machine most directly. But streamlined refrigerators were obviously styled, as evidenced by their purposeful concealment of machinery, sensuous curves, and precious surfaces. By applying the aerodynamic design vocabulary of transportation vehicles to stationary objects, streamlining contradicted functionalist principles. Whereas the universal, functionalist precepts espoused by modernists aimed at the ideal man, streamlining’s modernism aimed at the average woman.”[40]
In turn, Penny Sparke maintains that streamlining reconciled these conflicting spheres of production and domesticity through its “androgynous” aesthetic.[41] Appliances of this specific design helped reinforcing the difference between white middle-class Americans and working-class non-white immigrants. Since streamlining and mass-production made refrigerators look more and more alike, and forced small producers out of business, what kept industrial designers employed was the belief that constant change (in form) was needed in order to remain competitive.
The most influential figure of this approach was Raymond Loewy (1893-1986), a French-born engineer best known for his design for steam locomotives and refrigerators. He proved that the success of a product is as dependent on aesthetics as function. One of his famous quotes was: “between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will outsell the other.” Considered the “father of industrial design” and the “man who shaped America”, he designed refrigerators for Electrolux, Sears (Coldspot model) and Frigidaire. For Coldspot in particular, Loewy collaborated with Herman Price, a well-known refrigerator engineer: beside the streamlined design, they pioneered the use of aluminium for refrigerator shelving. Over the years, Sears’ Coldspot line of refrigerators featured other product innovations: in 1953, Coldspot upright freezers included dense fibreglass insulation that saved on electricity, plus a cabinet guaranteed not the “sweat”. The 1960 “Cold Guard” model was the first frostless refrigerator. The 1971 model included a built-in cold-water dispenser and an improved “humidrawer” food crisper. In 1977, Kenmore was a brand which was receiving more brand recognition, so Coldspot became Kenmore.
Joy Parr argues that on the postwar Canadian front, “most manufacturers of domestic goods were small businesses [which] could not absorb radical design changes in one step, or emphasize appearance in abstraction from tooling capacity.”[42] Parr also offers relevant statistics referring to US companies and Canadian market and talks about the importance of refrigerators in Canadian households. [43] Her research is based on a number of interviews with Canadian housewives, which show that in the mid-1950s Canadians considered mechanical fridges as the most valuable domestic appliances to have since they eliminated wetness and dirt. Parr’s study only covers the early postwar period and more research is needed for the remaining decades of the twentieth century.
For Acquisition:
- Emerson & Fisher refrigerators (1894) – wooden cabinets; models: The Cottage (single door/ double door); The Victor (single door/ double door); The Queen (single door/high grade); The Labrador (double door /highest finish); The Palace (Triple door/ highest finish) – marketed exclusively for wealthy clients – see FOOD J5519 3001 1894 L40586.
- One model of a 1920s fridge sold in America (Leonard, c. 1928): it has a few compartments for storage of various goods rather than altogether
- Color enamel outside (White Mountain, c. 1925), Nashua, New Hampshire
- Frigidaire models (1927) MP-9 or MP-12 are metal cabinets with two doors, built of steel and finished in porcelain-enamel steel with front of bright metal. They were advertised for a wealthy clientele – for brochure, see FOOD 9123 2008 1927.
- GE refrigerator with a flat-top (1933), with a flat-top instead of one with the cooling system on the top.
- Coldspot refrigerators (1935) designed by Raymond Loewy
- Electrol (1950) – company in Lachine, Montreal. Advertised in brochure: “Gives you complete food protection; safeguards your family’s health; cuts down your shopping expenses; enables you to serve more tempting dishes; its modern style and lustrous finish make it an APPEALING BEAUTY in your kitchen.” (majuscules as such in brochure)
- Cavalier Portable refrigerator (model 40E/1956) – small refrigerator “ideal for laboratories, offices, doctors, dentists, home bars, cottages, kitchenettes, trailers, motels, hotels, boats” (at the time distributed by Caverhill Learmont in Ottawa) – or Astral Baby Refrigerator, Silent Electric refrigerator, The World’s Finest Small Refrigerator (see FOOD T2476 3002 1935-1940).
- Kelvinator 1965 – Personalized refrigerators
- Frigidaire Gemini 19 (1966) – “a complete food storage center… less than a yard wide” “Another Frigidaire Space Age Advance” “Space Age Refrigeration” - Power capsule successor to old-fashioned compressor (technologically-advanced) – also frost-proof
- Whirlpool Connoiseur Twin (1967) – with door frames where different materials can be inserted to create a different “face” (advertised primarily for this design feature and technological features follow in ad)
- Eaton Viking “Imperial” (1967) – refrigerator with coloured doors, model advertised in conjunction with Centennial and Expo67 – exhibited at Expo?
Design of small appliances
Research on this topic is scarce and information is scattered in a number of studies. With regards to the early days of small electric appliances, Elizabeth Cromley discusses the relocation of some cooking equipment from the kitchen to the dining room, which boosted a more decorative appearance since they were made for the dining table or the sideboard (and thus on constant display). Cromley argues that “such ornamented cooking tools suggested that cooking did not always have to be sequestered in the kitchen, that perhaps cooking could be a kind of entertaining [itself] rather than dirty work.” She takes this argument further into the late twentieth century kitchen, where “this promise of cooking as entertainment was realized in the great-room kitchens where guests could help out at the commercial-sized cooktop.”[44]
From another viewpoint, Gotlieb and Golden discuss branding in the small appliance industry: “With competition growing fierce, branding emerged as a powerful competitive tool for the small appliance industry. Producing a comprehensive line ensured customer brand loyalty.”[45] It is interesting to investigate what brands of small appliances have been more advertised in Canada (look at ads in popular magazines) and which of these were popular with Canadians throughout the twentieth century (interview users in different generations and use interviews in existing archives).
The study of small appliances design should also be related to war industries. For instance, in the late 1940s Jack Luck reduced wartime aluminium smelting overcapacity to create domestic products (such as his successful coffee pot and frying pans). Also, period exhibitions such as Design in Industry and Design in the Household[46] offer an Optimistic view in showcasing new materials (aluminium, plastics) in their war uses versus peacetime uses (reinforcing the domestic ideal vision). In the same respect, Cold War insistence on domesticity and safety is insufficiently studied.
Each type of small appliance should also be discussed in accordance to its specific function and, by extension, to the historic evidence for related foods or beverages. For instance, for coffee makers an interesting point to be made is that they have become more diversified in function and form by the type of coffee they can produce. Has the constant flux of immigrants influenced the adoption of cappuccino, expresso, filter, European coffees? Alternatively, for kettles, the 1990s technology developed for the auto industry permitted new thermoplastics to be re-formed for greater strength and versatility, use less energy for processing and be cleaner to produce. Translucence appealed to fin-de-siecle designers’ fascination with lightness and transparency and different designs of kettles emerged. Toasters are directly related to baking, bread types and bread consumption (sandwiches, panini etc.). A short analysis of the artefacts in the CSTM collection underlines some design aspects and calls for further research to clarify reasons behind different period designs.
Toasters
1900: grills over open fire
1910-1920: horizontal and vertical toasters open elements on which bread is laid
1920-1930: horizontal toasters are closed and resemble syringe boxes (health related?)
c. 1920: for vertical toasters, design includes an element which holds bread in place; doors make their appearance
1920-1930: vertical toasters are ornate with decorations of the era (Art Deco) as they are used on the table during meal: convenience and beauty combined
Combinations: toaster and hot plate to brew coffee
1930: the Duo toaster “it toasts both sides at once” from National Electric Toronto Canada
1940: Vertical toasters of half-round shape – design is war-related? / also, others more austere-looking
Design influenced by technological trials after the war:
1945: sliding-toast model up to down – sleek design but probably not very practical as toast landed on the table cloth
c. 1945: sliding-toast moves through toaster
Combinations: toaster and hot plate
1960: all-purpose horizontal toaster (bread, waffles, meats etc.)
1977: “silent” toaster – lowers and rises toast automatically without button to push
1995: plastic outer shell to keep cool-touch exterior even when toaster operates
1995: multi-tasking or specialized small appliances
Combinations: toasts bread, fries eggs and makes coffee
2000: 4-slice toasters (when first introduced? When becoming popular choice? Were they available in the 1950s or 1960s for families of baby boomers?)
For Acquisition:
- Vulcan Adjustable Toaster (1900) – to be held manually over the fire
- Toastmaster from Waters-Genter Company (1928) – 3 slice, 4 slice and sandwich model: looks like a miniature stove “the bread is lowered in the oven” see FOOD W3296 1928
- Duo Toaster (1930) “it toasts both sides at once” from National Electric Toronto Canada
- Canadian Beauty Turnover Toaster (c. 1927) produced by Renfrew Electric Products, Renfrew, ON, distributed by Northern Electric – see pamphlet in FOOD R4116 1927; resembles artefact 1992.0670.001 from US, Landers Frary & Clark
- ? is there any artefact in the collection which has same ‘silent’ technology as advertised 1977 Sunbeam toaster in FOOD S9576 1977
- 1950-1960 4-slice toasters
Coffee makers
For Acquisition:
- Jack Luck’s Coffee Pot (1949), designed for Aluminium Goods, Toronto; received NIDC Design Award (1953-1955, exhibited at Milan Triennale / Dimensions: 24.8 x 21.2 x 14
Kettles
For Acquisition:
- 51-2 Electric kettle (1948), designer Sid Bersudsky for General Steel Wares, London, ON
- K2 electric kettle (1943), designer Thomas Penrose for Canadian Westinghouse Comp, Hamilton, ON (a beehive version of Fred Moffat’s “chrome dome”)
- Supreme K69 electric kettle (1952-55), designer Julian Rowan at DKR, for Filtro Electric, Toronto
- Life Long model 89005 electric kettle (1970), designer Jerry Adamson at KAN Industrial Design, for Proctor-Silex, Picton, ON
- K840 Electric Kettle (1980), designer Fred Moffat, for Canadian General Electric, Barrie, ON (elliptical design which discouraged imitations as it required more complex tooling to bend the compound curves)
- PK 502 electric kettle (1990), designer Glenn Moffat, for Superior Electrics, Pembroke, ON
- Model 7304 electric kettle (1997), designer unknown for Toastess, Pointe-Claire, Quebec (translucent candy-colour plastic with a high-tech sheen)
ATTACH to this report two pages of pictures from Gotlieb pp.208-209 for easy identification, more info and dimensions.
Timeline
|May 1893 |Chicago |“World’s Columbian Exhibition” (400 years since Columbus had discovered |
| | |America). 3 buildings out of the total 150 had model kitchens displays. |
|1920s |early |Small appliances (toasters, irons, kettles etc. arrive in Canada), status |
| | |symbols, high cost, accessible only to wealthy people |
|1925 |Paris, France |“Exposition Internationale des Art Decoratifs et Industriels Moderne” (very |
| | |influential in promoting ‘visual’ in connection with ‘new’/modern) |
|1927 |Hamilton, ON |Exhibition: “Produced in Canada” (also called “Made in Canada” in some sources |
| | |and years) - jointly hosted by the Canadian Manufacturer's Assocation and |
| | |municipal booster organizations like the Chamber of Commerce. Over 90,000 |
| | |people attended. References mainly in newspapers like The Spectator and the |
| | |Herald, and in the city's Chamber of Commerce records held at the Hamilton |
| | |Public Library; some information on it in the Canadian Manufacturers’ |
| | |Association fonds held at LAC. |
|1945 |Toronto |Exhibition: “Design in Industry” |
| |Royal Ontario Museum |(sponsored by the Ontario Handicrafts Guild) |
|1946 |Toronto |Exhibition: “Design in the Household” (sponsored by the Toronto Board of Trade,|
| |Toronto Art Gallery |Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, NFB Canada and MoMA, New York) |
|June 1948 |Ottawa |Donald Buchanan establishes the National Industrial Design Council, which will |
| | |give awards in the following decades to promote Canadian industrial design |
| | |(appliances which got such awards need to be researched in order to become part|
| | |of the CSTM collection) |
|1948-49 |Ottawa |Exhibition: “Canadian Design for Everyday Life” (or Use?), organized by |
| | |National Industrial Design Council: exhibited Jack Luck’s coffee maker and Sid |
| | |Bersudsky’s kettle |
|1948 | |Association of Canadian Industrial Designers is founded |
|1949 |Vancouver |Exhibition: “Design for Living” – illustrated how the principles of modern |
| | |design could be incorporated into every room of a house from a child’s bedroom |
| | |to a kitchen |
|c. 1950 |National Industrial |Published two booklets aimed at industry: |
| |Design Council |“Good Design Will Sell Canadian Products” |
| | |“How the Industrial Designer Can Help You in Your Business” |
|1951 |Royal Ontario Museum |Exhibition: “Industrial Design: 1951 B.C. – A.D. 1951”, organized in |
| |Toronto |conjunction with the Association of Canadian Industrial Designers. Along with |
| | |modern products, it highlighted the careers of emerging professional designers.|
|1951 |Canada-wide |NIDC launches a national design competition with funding supplied by the |
| | |National Gallery, ALCAN and the Canadian Lumbermen Association. Selection |
| | |Criteria are a manifesto for modernism. Rigid process: no winners, only |
| | |honourable mentions. |
|1953 |? (location to be determined) |“Canada's Tomorrow” conference (sponsored by Westinghouse) – archives at |
| | |McMaster University |
|1954 |Milan Triennale, Italy |Canadian modernist designs appear for the first time on the prestigious |
| | |international scene for design and architecture |
|1954 |Royal Ontario Museum Toronto |Exhibition: “Design in Scandinavia” – 22 cities traveling exhibition showcasing|
| | |more than 700 objects, many of which have become modernist icons; the show |
| | |greatly influences future works of Canadian designers |
|1955 (1956?) |NFB film |“Design for Living” – a naively propagandistic film which features designer |
| | |Jack Luck as a brave new modernist: in his crisp white shirt and tie, he |
| | |sketches at his drafting table, designing aluminium cookware. |
|1956 |Ottawa, |Exhibition: “Good Design in Aluminium”, organized by Montreal-based designer |
| |National Gallery Canada |Julien Hébert. |
|1958 |Canada-wide |Canadian General Electric joins forces with Hydro-Electric Power Commission of |
| | |Ontario to organize the “Live Better Electrically” advertising campaign |
| | |(following the model set by the US General Electric) |
|1958 |Canada-wide |Canadian Manufacturers’ Association launches its “Buy Canadian” crusade, |
| | |dispensing maple leaf tags to Canadian companies and staging displays at |
| | |Eaton’s and other major retailers |
|1967-1970 |CMHC, Ottawa |Swedish-born Montreal designer Sigrun Bulow-Huve completes a study on kitchen |
| | |ergonomics (available at CMHC) – the designer’s archives available at McGill |
| | |University library |
|Summer |Montreal |EXPO 67 – Important event in conjunction with celebrating the Confederation |
|1967 | |Centennial |
|1974 |World-wide |Oil crisis had an impact on design: based on his 1971 publication “Design for |
| | |the Real World”, Victor Papanek (US) launched a movement for socially |
| | |responsible ecological design – Jerry Adamson’s (KAN) electric kettle for |
| | |Proctor-Silex is an ecological design, with replacing sections (but not a |
| | |commercial success) |
|1983-1987 |U.S. - Italy |U.S. architect Michael Graves designs kettle line for Alessi, which becomes an |
| | |icon of the 1980s, though expensive $200 |
|1989 |World-wide |Recession / Free Trade Agreement ratified: all sectors of Canadian |
| | |manufacturing suffered |
|1985 |Barrie, Ontario |Black & Decker closes its Barrie, Ontario plant, ending the half-century-long |
| | |production of Fred Moffat-designed electric kettles |
|198? |Ottawa |Cutbacks: Brian Mulroney’s Conservative Government closes Design Canada |
| | |(formerly National Industrial Design Council) |
|1999 |U.S. |U.S. architect Michael Graves designs appliances for Target (toasters, coffee |
| | |pots etc.) which sell for competitive prices |
Further needed research:
- Explore connections between Canadian and American appliance producing companies – see how they influence both markets (see for ex. link between Superior Electrics in Canada and Sunbeam and Toastmaster in the U.S.); method: start with a survey of US companies (producers and distributors of electrical appliances) operating in Canada in the 19th, 20th and 21st century and a survey of Canadian-based similar companies; draw comparisons and identify further steps
- Identify more industrial designers who designed kitchen appliances and their inspirational sources, links to other products
- Possibly interview prominent Canadian industrial designers
- Compile a report based on Anna Adamek’s initiative to survey present users of domestic appliances
- Research changes in legislation: technology patent versus design patent. Various reports from the Isley Commission on Copyright, Patents, Industrial Design and Trademarks are available for the late 1950s. The reports may be consulted online and the evidence is accessible through Library and Archives Canada. The Royal Commission issued a separate report for each category of IP. Dr. Harold Fox, Q.C. was the lawyer who represented a number of industrial concerns on the issue of Industrial Design. Many of their recommendations weren't initially acted upon and the resulting regime of intellectual property emerged quite slowly on an ad hoc basis from the time of the Isley reports to the 1980s.
- In-depth study of small appliances based on similar methodologies and arguments as Shelley Nickles’ article on “Refrigerator design as social process”. Useful resources are store catalogues (Eaton, Dupuis Frères), archives of electric companies (Ontario Hydro, SaskPower etc.), and archives of companies which produced and/or distributed domestic appliances (ex: Westinghouse Canada). See bibliography for location of various archives and fonds.
- Investigate archives of Canadian provincial electric companies for examples of employees charged with ‘teaching’ the population how to use new electric appliances (see example of Penny Powers from SaskPower, note 9)
- The social role of design and the designer in the new millennium 2000
Short biographies of a few Canadian designers who designed domestic appliances:
(Compiled from The Modern Eye exhibition catalogue and Gotlieb, Rachel, and Cora Golden. Design in Canada, 2004; for more designers see also Joy Parr, Domestic Goods, esp. chapter 6 on Inter/national Style, pp. 122-142)
Adamson, Jerry
Born in 1937 in Cambridge, Ontario
Industrial designer, Kuypers Adamson Norton (KAN)
(In Modern Eye)
Electric Kettle (1970) for Proctor-Silex, Picton, ON
Dimensions: 16.5 x 27.3 x 22.2 cm
(In Gotlieb, under KAN, p. 241)
Degree in industrial design from the Ontario College of Art and worked with the well-known designer Robin Bush. Joined DRK in 1963 and became a partner in 1968.
Addison Industries
Late 1930s-1955, Toronto
(In Gotlieb)
Launched in the late thirties to distribute General Electric’s line of Norge appliances in Canada, Addison Industries eventually manufactured electric appliances (refrigerators, stoves, washers and water heaters), small appliances (toasters, irons, vacuum cleaners and hearting pads) and consumer electronics (console and tabletop radios, televisions and electric pianos). The company is best remembered, however, for its colourful plastic radios, which have become highly collectible in the international market.
[more in the book, not relevant for this study]
Bersudsky, Sid
Born 1915, Odessa, Ukraine; died 1993
(In Gotlieb)
Trained as an illustrator, Sid Bersudsky became one of Canada`s first industrial designers, modelling his career after American pioneers like Raymond Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague. He embraced plastics, then a new material, and earned twenty patents in Canada and the U.S. for products like a dust remover and fibreglass bowling ball.
Bersudsky, who was raised in New Brunswick, studied illustration at the New York Students League (1937-38), where he was exposed to the design profession and its leaders. On his return to Saint John, he worked as a cartoonist, graphic artist and illustrator. By 1946 he found the call of industrial design irresistible. He established Sid Bersudsky and Associates in the small city of Sydney, Nova Scotia, and created a prototype chair formed from a single sheet of acrylic.
Bersudsky relocated to Toronto in 1948. In addition to plastics, he gained some repute designing housewares and small appliances for clients such as General Steelwares and Superior Electrics. He won several NIDC awards (including for an automatic iron and a gas-fired furnace) and became the council`s representative to the Society of Plastics Industries. A staunch supporter of professional accreditation, he was a longtime member of the Association of Canadian Industrial Designers and served as its president in 1963. Eleven years earlier, he had been the first Canadian accepted as a member of the American Society of Industrial Designer. Bersudsky was awarded a Centennial medal in 1967.
Canadian General Electric Company
1892-1976, Montreal
(In Gotlieb)
Canadian General Electric Company was Canada`s premier manufacturer of large and small appliances. Its brand name was so well-known among consumers that it rarely gave in to national retailers` demands for less expensive private-label versions of its popular designs. The company first produced electric lamps, generators, transformers, motors and cables. In its heyday, during the fifties, it operated plants across Ontario and Quebec.
The small-appliance factory in Barrie, Ontario, opened in the post-war era. It produced clocks, small appliances, heaters and outdoor equipment. The freelancer Fred Moffat of Toronto was its principal designer. After the Second World War, the Toronto factory manufactured consumer electronics, although most radios, for example, were based on U.S.-designed moulds. In the late sixties, Robin Bush designed wooden cabinetry for stereos, including an adventurous spherical design that never went into production. CGE ran a large plastic moulding plant in Cobourg, Ontario, which sometimes contracted its services to other companies.
Industry consolidation resulted in Black& Decker taking over the small-appliance division in 1984, and it was closed the following year.CGE`s major-appliance factory, based in Montreal, merged with Canadian Appliance Manufacturing Company (CAMCO) in 1977. GE Canada, a subsidiary of General Electric Company, opened in Toronto in 1987.
Canadian Westinghouse Company
Founded 1896, Hamilton
(In Gotlieb)
Westinghouse Manufacturing Company was founded in 1896 in Hamilton to sell and manufacture air brakes for steam railways. Seven years later, Canadian Westinghouse Company was incorporated to manufacture electrical equipment and large and small household appliances such as fridges and toasters. In 1922 the American and Canadian branches collaborated to produce the first radiotron (vacuum-tube-powered radio) manufactured in Canada, although it was held back from the market for five years because of technical unreliability. The most collectible Canadian designs to emerge from this century-old Canadian branch are its Personality radios. […]
Throughout the forties and fifties, the engineer Thomas Penrose oversaw the production of small appliances, including electric toasters, kettles and irons. In 1971 the company received an IDAP (Industrial Design Assistance Program) grant from the National Design Council to co-develop the partially plastic Galaxy electric kettle with the Toronto-based industrial firm Savage Sloan. Westinghouse Canada (as it was now named) merged with the major appliance company CAMCO in 1977.
Dallaire, Michel
Born 1942, Paris, France
(In Gotlieb)
Michel Dallaire is Montreal’s leading industrial designer of consumer products. Son of the noted French modern painter Jean Dallaire, he was educated at Montreal’s Institut des Art Appliques. He studied interior and industrial design under Julien Hebert (and later worked with him) and graduated in 1963. Awarded a grant from the NIDC, he continued his studies at Stockholm’s School of Arts, Crafts and Design (Konstfackskolan) until 1965. […]
Dallaire has designed electrical kitchen appliances for CGE, the official torch for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal and, along with Andre Jarry, modular furniture for Montreal’s Olympic Village (1972). He won the Canada Award for Business Excellence three times..
Ducharme, Max
Active 1960s and 1970s
(In Gotlieb)
Max Ducharme insisted that designers be valued for their market knowledge rather than their aesthetic sensibilities. A 1958 graduate of the Ontario College of Art, Ducharme joined the industrial design division of Philips a year after exploring Europe on an Eaton’s design scholarship. The company was phasing out the Rogers-Majestic brand (purchased in 1954), although it continued to operate out of its former plant. Within a few years, Ducharme became chief designer in the consumer electronics division, a position he held until 1980, when Philips closed as a result of competition from Asia.
The division, which reported to marketing rather than engineering, designed televisions, stereos, tuner/amplifiers and cassette recorders, as well as a few radios and small appliances. About 90 per cent of its designs were original rather than adaptations from its Dutch parent, although most reflected the styles of the day, like French Provincial. The department Ducharme led was respected internally but often ignored externally, as the bulk of its design output was in traditional styles. […]
KAN Industrial Design (previously DKR)
1963-1996, Toronto
(In Gotlieb)
KAN is one of the longest-running design studios in Canada. It shaped Canada’s products and environments, creating furniture, world’s fair exhibits, stoves, lighting and playground equipment.
Designers: Jan Kuypers, Julian Rowan and Frank Dudas (founded DRK in 1963).
Julian Rowan – born in Edmonton, AB in 1925 and studied sciences at the University of Alberta and plastics engineering at the Plastics Industries Technical Institute in Los Angeles. On his return to Canada, he created toys and housewares etc.
Ian Norton – partner at DRK, specialized in small appliances.
See also Jerry Adamson
Luck, Jack
Born 1912, London, England; died 1963
(In Gotlieb)
Many North Americans have used Jack Luck’s simple, functional designs. He designed award-winning pots and pans, kettles and coffee makers, even door pulls under the brand name Wear-Ever Aluminium and Mayfair. His expertise in aluminium was acquired at Alcan, where he spent a large time of his career and in turn introduced the company to the process of creating and documenting sketches, working drawings and models.
Luck immigrated to Canada in 1930 and joined the Alcan subsidiary Aluminium Goods in Toronto. He later moved to its Montreal office to become a draftsman in the engineering department. When the firm founded Aluminium Laboratories in 1936, Luck joined the new division but continued to work concurrently as an artist and cartographer. When the lab moved to Kingston, Ontario, in 1949, he uprooted once again and helped to reduce wartime aluminium smelting overcapacity by using the metal to create products for the home. Over the years, Luck won four NIDC awards for aluminium cookware and by 1958 was lecturing on industrial design at the University of Toronto. He also served as president of the Association of Canadian Industrial Designers.
(In Modern Eye)
From the late 1930s to the 1950s, Luck worked for Aluminium Laboratories, a division of Aluminium Goods Ltd., itself a subsidiary of Alcan. He designed cookware – including his well-known coffee pot – in aluminium, which was abundant after the war. His coffee pot received NIDC Design Awards (1953-55) and was shown in the industrial design section of the Milan Triennale in 1954. It was also included in Domus magazine and Industrial Design in America, 1954. His cookware set won an NIDC Design Award in 1955.
McIntosh, Lawrie
Born 1924, Clinton, ON
(In Modern Eye)
McIntosh studied mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto (1942-46). Between 1948 and 1950, he studied industrial design at the Institute of Design in Chicago (Illinois Institute of Technology – in Gotlieb) on a NIDC scholarship – master’s degree in 1951. The Institute, which was founded and run by Bauhaus educator Laszlo Molohy-Nagy between 1937 and 1946, and later headed by architect Serge Chermayeff, encouraged its students to make experimental furniture with cardboard and plywood sets. During McIntosh’s time there, Buckminster Fuller [author note: architect who designed Geodesic Dome at Expo 67] was a guest lecturer.
In the early 1950s, after a brief stint with the design department of John B. Parkin (Toronto), McIntosh started his own industrial design company in Toronto (McIntosh Design Associates) which he ran until retirement in 1994. In 1952, he won first prize in the second annual NIDC design competition for a chari made of moulded plywood and metal tube. Most of McIntosh’s design work is centered on electrical appliances and equipment used on farms, in recreation and within medical and scientific fields. An iron he designed in 1953 with B.H. Pickard (for Steam Electric Products, Toronto) won a gold medal at the ’54 Milan Triennale where his plywood chair was also exhibited. A kettle designed for Superior Electrics in ’68 was still in production almost 40 years later. Over the course of his career he was also a frequent lecturer at the Ontario College of Art.
(In Gotlieb)
During the fifties and sixties, McIntosh designed the Lady Torcan hair dryer, as well as appliances plugs, trouble lights and electric kettles.
By 1960, when McIntosh was elected president of the Association of Canadian Industrial Designers, he had already returned to his engineering roots by designing the Cobalt 60 therapy machine for Atomic Energy Canada Limited (AECL). Over the next two decades, he saw AECL’s Theratron cancer treatment machine through numerous generations of design innovation. In 1981 McIntosh was given citations for outstanding achievement by Design Canada and ACID. Between 1983 and 1989, he taught design at the Ontario College of Art.
Moffat, Fred
Born 1912, Toronto, ON
(In Modern Eye)
Moffat was a graphic artist who later designed electric appliances for Canadian General Electric (CGE). He is best known for the K42 Electric kettle - inspired by the head-light of a McLaughlin-Buick – designed in 1940. He received an NIDC award for a floor polisher (1953-55) and a Silver medal at the ’64 Milan Triennale for the design of a CGE electric heater.
(In Gotlieb)
Fred Moffat’s design for an electric kettle became so pervasive that its chrome dome is considered both a fifties icon and a remarkable Canadian success.
Moffat attended Central Technical School in Toronto, where he assisted the noted war memorial sculptor Alfred Howell. He cut woodblocks at Southam Press, then apprenticed as an illustrator at Rapid, Grip & Batten alongside well-known Canadian painters like Jack Bush and Charles Comfort. In the late 1920s, he worked at McLaren Advertising, where CGE was a major client, and by night took classes at the Ontario College of Art. He opened his own firm in 1931 and began making the transition into industrial design.
For the next fifty years, his principal client was CGE, for which he designed everything from kettles to electric lawn mowers. He won numerous awards, including two NIDC honours for a floor polisher and a food mixer, and a silver medal at the 1964 Milan Triennale for CGE’s teardrop-shape electric space heater.
His son, Glenn Moffat, joined the firm in 1967 and kept up the family tradition by designing kettles (mostly in plastic) for Black & Decker and Superior Electrics, as well as other consumer and industrial products.
Orr, Enest
Cookware designer, Supreme Aluminium Industries Ltd., Toronto, ON.
(In Modern Eye)
His Supreme Deluxe Teapot (c. 1954) received NIDC Design Award in 1954-55.
Rogers-Majestic/Philips Electronics Canada
Founded 1924, Toronto
(In Gotlieb)
extract: A company founded by Edward Rogers (father of Ted Rogers, now head of Rogers Communications), created from many mergers. By 1934 the consumer electronics division manufactured car radios for both Ford and General Motors and acquired Consolidated Industries, makers of DeForest-Crosley radios, Norge electric refrigerators and Hammond Clocks.
Spencer, Hugh
Born 1928, England; died 1982
(In Gotlieb)
extract: Outspoken and audacious, Hugh Spencer created some of the most avant-garde designs to come out of this country, causing Time magazine to proclaim in a 1965 issue, “The unit [Clairtone’s Project G stereo] comes not from Mars but from Canada.” Spencer, however, stated that a designer’s role was merely to “observe, comprehend, select, reason and re-assemble.” […] Spencer also designed packaging and promotional materials for clients such as Canadian Westinghouse Company, Philips Electronics Canada and Kodak Canada. In these endeavours, he partnered with the celebrated graphic designers Paul Arthur (Arthur + Spencer) and Don Watt.
Superior Electrics
Founded 1917, Pembroke, Ontario
(In Gotlieb)
Superior Electrics is one of Canada’s last independent manufacturers of small appliances. Over the past fifty years, it has made products by many stellar Canadian designers including Sid Bersudsky, Lawrie McIntosh and currently Glenn Moffat (son of Fred Moffat). It is the last company to produce the chrome dome kettle in North America.
Founded in 1917 by three Pembroke businessmen (within a semi-finished bankrupt model), the company originally specialized in electric heaters for barns. After the war, Superior Electrics produced an array f items such as electric irons, fans and compact stoves. In 1972 it was briefly owned by the Japanese consumer electronics company Magnasonic, which then sold it to its present owner, Harold Shifman.
Superior Electrics entered the electric kettle market in the late seventies, when it acquired the tools and dies from McGraw-Edison Canada, Toronto. Superior moved into plastics manufacturing in 1989, after it purchased the assets of Creative Appliance. Superior subcontracts for the American companies Sunbeam and Toastmaster, which enables it to compete with the multinationals. Currently the electric kettle is its most popular appliance and its largest production run, selling thousands of units annually.
Toastess
1945-2000, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
(In Gotlieb)
For more than fifty years, privately owned Toastess produced small appliances for the Canadian market. Originally named H & S Products for its founders Harry and Louis Solomon, the firm initially manufactured hand-mixers. In 1949 they entered the portable appliance filed with an electric toaster and by 1962 were producing electric kettles, electric frying pans and waffle irons.
In the nineties, Toastess changed management and introduced computerized injection-moulded plastic machinery to manufacture translucent electric kettles. As for the toaster, the product that gave Toastess its name, models were imported from China. Despite the media attention for its candy-coloured kettles and a contract from the American housewares distributor Williams-Sonoma, Toastess closed its doors in 2000. [no reason given – to investigate?]
Selected bibliography:
Books and articles:
Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Buchanan, Donald. Design for use : a survey of design in Canada of manufactured goods for the home and office, for sports and outdoors : including photographs from the exhibition, Design in industry / National Gallery of Canada in co-operation with the Department of Re-construction and Supply and the National Film Board of Canada. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1947
Castillo, Greg. Cold War on the Home Front. The Soft Power of Mid-century Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Cooke, Nathalie, ed. What’s to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies for Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983
Cromley, Elizabeth Collins. The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating and the Architecture of American Houses. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010
Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society, 1750-1980. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986 (reprint New York 1992)
Gotlieb, Rachel, and Cora Golden. Design in Canada since 1945: Fifty Years from Teakettles to Task Chairs. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2004
de Grazia, Victoria, ed. The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Heinmann, Jim, ed. All-American Ads, 1900-1919. Köln, Los Angeles: Taschen, 2005.
Heinmann, Jim, ed. All-American Ads of the 20s. Köln, Los Angeles: Taschen, 2004.
Heinmann, Jim, ed. All-American Ads of the 30s. Köln, Los Angeles: Taschen, 2003.
Heinmann, Jim, ed. All-American Ads 40s. Köln, New York: Taschen, 2001.
Heinmann, Jim, ed. All-American Ads 50s. Köln, Los Angeles: Taschen, 2002.
Heinmann, Jim, ed. All-American Ads 60s. Köln, Los Angeles: Taschen, 2002.
Heinmann, Jim, ed. All-American Ads 70s. Köln, Los Angeles: Taschen, 2004.
Heinmann, Jim, ed. All-American Ads 80s. Köln, Los Angeles: Taschen, 2005.
Heskett, John. Industrial Design. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Iovine, Julie. Michael Graves. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002.
Korinek, Valerie J. Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000
Meikle, Jeffrey L. Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979.
Lerman, Nina E., Arwen P. Mohun and Ruth Oldenziel, eds. Gender & Technology: A Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Lerner, Loren and Mary F. Williamson. Art and Architecture in Canada: A Bibliography and Guide to the Literature, to 1981, 2 vols. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991 (available online).
Lupton, Ellen and J. Abbott Miller. The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination. New York: Kiosk, 1996, c.1992.
Nickles, Shelley. “"Preserving Women": Refrigerator Design as Social Process in the 1930s.” Technology and Culture 43, 4 (Oct. 2002), 693-727.
Nickles, Shelley. “More is Better. Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America.” American Quarterly, 54, 4 (Dec. 2002), 581-622.
Nye, David. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.
Parr, Joy. Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral and the Economic in the Post-War Years. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Sparke, Penny. Electrical Appliances. London: Unwin Hyman, 1987.
Sparke, Penny. As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Space. Halifax, N.S.: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2010.
Sparke, Penny. A Century of Design: Design Pioneers of the 20th Century. Hauppauge, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1998.
Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework. Henry Holt, 1982.
Thwaites, Thomas. The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011.
Wajcman, Judy and Donald MacKenzie, eds. The Social Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum. Milton Keynes, Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985.
Ward, Peter. A History of Domestic Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home. Vancouver Toronto: UBC Press, 1999
For English ads:
Chatelaine (archives at Macleans-Hunter Publishers in Toronto, 1928-1975 collection at McGill University)
Maclean’s (archives at Macleans-Hunter Publishers in Toronto; collection at Carleton University, Ottawa)
Canadian Homes (& Gardens) (1925-1960 available at McGill University)
Canadian Home Journal (1910-1918 available at McGill University)
For French ads:
Chatelaine (French version)
La Revue Moderne (archives at Biblioteque et Archives Nationales Quebec for 1919-1960)
La Revue Populaire (see website: )
Studies:
Bülow-Hübe, Sigrun. Kitchen Research Program. CMHC, 1967-1970.
(Available at Canadian Housing Information Centre, CMHC, Montreal Road, Ottawa
TX 653 B84 v.1; Sigrun Bülow-Hübe archives at McGill University library)
Dissertations:
Nickles, Shelley. “Object Lessons: Household Appliance Design and the American Middle Class, 1920-1960.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1999.
Store catalogues:
- Eaton catalogues
- Dupuis Frères (postwar domestic technologies – archives at l'École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) à Montréal)
- Westinghouse Canada fonds at McMaster University: trade magazines, worker's newsletters, old flyers and salesmen's circulars, product catalogues, photographs (mostly of the factories but also of sales floors and products) etc.
- Ontario Hydro Corporate Archives: “Live Better Electrically Program”, April 1958, File F5701.
Catalogues of collectibles and exhibitions:
Higgins, Katherine. Collecting the 1970s. Miller`s, 2001.
Miller, Judith. Sixties Style. London, New York: DK Publishing, 2006.
--- The Modern Eye: Craft and Design in Canada, 1940-1980, exhibition catalogue, curated by Allan Collier, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, July 22 – November 27, 2011
Additional sources:
National Film Board (archives for documentaries and films)
National Gallery of Canada (archives for design exhibitions)
National Design Council (archives at Library and Archives Canada)
Similar artefacts in other collections:
- DX Design Exchange, Toronto
- Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau
- Musée des Beaux Arts, Montreal
- McCord Museum, Montreal
Useful Websites:
On designer Raymond Loewy:
brands/coldspot.htm
On popular magazines:
For period 1925-1960:
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[1] For this study, I have consulted the trade literature collection at the library of Canada Science and Technology Museum. See bibliography for location of other relevant such collections.
[2] I am very grateful to Mary Williamson for providing this information. She also mentions the newsletter of the Ephemera Society of Canada as a great source of articles (available at Fisher Library at University of Toronto), and records of private collectors of trade cards in Canada, available at Toronto Reference Library. Information about trade cards may also be found at Donald Buchanan papers at the National Gallery of Canada and Library and Archives Canada.
[3] The link between refrigerator and automobile production emerged early. For example, Kelvinator and Frigidaire originated in Detroit in the 1910s. “Both demand capacity in metal working and require electrical and cooling systems. Both are assembled from similar parts, a crankcase, pistons, cylinders, cam shafts, a pulley, and fan in the compressor. Early in the century both showed mass market promise.” See Joy Parr, Domestic Goods, 247.
[4] Ruth Schwartz Cowan convincingly argues that the U.S. had started electric development earlier than other countries, which brought along lowered prices and thus greater affordability. Standardization of products and services was a key factor in this as it inevitably lowers the cost of production, which then lowers the retail cost of goods. “So few American companies held the crucial patents on the manufacture of electrical goods that it was a relatively simple matter for them to agree on standardization – and then to ensure standardization by cross-licensing their patents (cross-licensing being the exchange of licenses on patents by two or more manufacturers). See Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother, 92-93.
[5] In the first months of 1965, a good number of Maclean’s issues published letters from readers across Canada debating that the maple was not the quintessential Canadian tree as it is non-existent in some areas of the country.
[6] In general, these decades refer to America, although such appliances also existed in Canada at the time; see respective sections later in this study for a separate discussion of chronological events per appliance.
[7] McClary Refrigerators pamphlet declares “Trust this Canadian Family of Fine Products”, while on the opposite page it says “Choose the Features You Want in a Size which Suits Your Family”, FOOD G3269 3006 C1965 L34792 in CSTM trade literature collection. See also brochure for Moffat refrigerators, McClary Easy, which shows pictures of a family inspecting appliances, children looking into a fridge, colourful fridges etc., in FOOD M1263 3012 1963 L33240.
[8] Frigidaire Frozen Delights, recipe book. FOOD F9123 3008 1927 L40409, in CSTM trade literature collection.
[9] “Ways to Better Living with your 1957 Leonard Refrigerator”. FOOD L5817 3002 1957 L25253, in CSTM trade literature collection.
[10] For example, Cooking with Cold, a brochure from Kelvinator of Canada Limited, was addressed “to the modern woman who looks at home-making as both a science and an art”. It has a detailed presentation of the refrigerator, advice on how and where to store the different foods (improperly chilled foods will “completely ruin an otherwise delicious dinner”), and advice about how to prepare and serve different kind of meals such as “bridge luncheon”, “afternoon tea”, “informal dinner”, “buffet supper”, “children’s parties”. See Cooking with Cold, cookbook by Kelvinator of Canada Limited, FOOD K2995 3003 C1925 L23956 in CSTM collection of trade literature. See also other cookbooks in the collection, like The Automatic Cookbook: Selected Recipes for Time and Temperature Oven Cooking, FOOD B3652 3916 1927, and a recipe book directed to girls in the 1950s: Fun to Cook Book, FOOD C2882 3001 1955.
[11] I am grateful to Merle Messie for a comment made on the H-Canada listserv with regards to how previous generations welcomed new appliances: “My Ukrainian Baba (grandmother) never did get used to her 'new' electric stove (although she liked the predictability of the oven). She cooked everything on the stove on 'high' and would just move it off to the side when things got too hot! To me, this speaks to how cooking techniques (and by extension, recipes) had to be re-learned or re-written. Penny Powers, the spokes-girl for SaskPower, spent much of her energy 'teaching' clients how to make that critical switch.”
[12] Strasser, 29.
[13] See Cromley, The Food Axis.
[14] In some parts of Canada, the postwar open-concept is also related to an economy of financial resources: in an interview, architect Paul Meschino mentions that he provided the least number of doors to postwar house designs in Newfoundland, as doors were expensive items which could be easily removed from the overall design. Such design practices increased the acceptance of the open-plan by both homeowners and builders. For a discussion of Canadian postwar models of small houses and transformation in house design, see Ioana Teodorescu, “Building Small Houses in Canada: Architects, Homeowners and Bureaucratic Ideals, 1947-1974”, Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, 2012.
[15] Gotlieb, 15.
[16] Gotlieb, 15.
[17] Spinning gives round forms, while extrusions are hard edged and casting is fluid.
[18] See various advertisements of the 1950s in folder FOOD I6100 3004-3020 1950s: “Now you can change your refrigerator as often as you change your mind”; “Room for everything but doubt” (suggesting control, know-all); “Color – let ‘em know you have it!”; “They’re new … and years ahead. International Harvester Refrigerators – they’re femineered.”; “Sell color… over and over. It’s EXCLUSIVE!”; “Now a refrigerator to match your kitchen colors!”; “The refrigerator of tomorrow TODAY Introducing the 1957 … Servel Deluxe Gas refrigerator” (model 976G); “Please yourself with a New Westinghouse Refrigerator or Freezer for ‘67”.
[19] See 1918 advertisement for the Conservo fridge: “No housewife can afford to be without it”, in Jim Heinmann (ed.), All-American Ads, 1900-1919, p. 254. On the same page, advertisements for “New Perfection” oil stoves from 1909 and 1919, respectively.
[20] Oil-powered (?) kettle in advertisement for Lozier 1912 in All-American Ads, 1900-1919.
[21] See for example, an illustration of an electric chafing dish in Catalogue Electric Shop Chicago Things Electrical, 1913, p. 9, CSTM trade literature: ELECT E3879 3001 1913; or an illustration promoting General Electric services in a demonstration of some early electrical appliances in 1908: woman with a chafing dish plugged into the electrical lamp, in David E. Nye, Electrifying America, MIT Press, 1991, figure 6.3, p. 251.
[22] To investigate Canada’s participation – maybe in conjunction with the U.K.?
[23] References mainly in newspapers like The Spectator and The Herald, and in the city's Chamber of Commerce records held at the Hamilton Public Library; some information on it in the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association fonds held at LAC.
[24] In an advertisement for Kelvinator, 1934.
[25] See Joy Parr, Domestic Goods.
[26] This design obsession with the atom had started in the previous decade. See also the Atomiom, Belgium pavilion at the 1956 Brussels World-Fair.
[27] See Rachel Gotlieb and Cora Golden, Design in Canada.
[28] Recession inspired baby boomers to stay at home and “cocoon”.
[29] Anna Adamek made this point while we discussed the survey she initiated in 2012, when she asked appliance users to name their preferred appliance (which they could not do without) and reasons. In terms of design, there was a clear preference for black appliances versus stainless steel; the ‘hands-off’ aspect was also prevailed, which gives appliances the role of a mediator between humans and food; generational perspective remains important as people in different generations have different uses for the same appliance.
[30] In some of the newest models of Viking appliances, design prevails over function: for instance, the door of the microwave completely covers the button panel, when shut; for the refrigerator, the cold-water fountain is placed on the inside to preserve the outside sleek look (to attach pictures).
[31] Strasser, p.20.
[32] Frozen Desserts and Salads Made in Frigidaire, FOOD 9123 2008 1927 L40409, in CSTM trade literature collection.
[33] The Architect’s Handbook of Electric Refrigeration, published by General Electric, 1928, FOOD G3268 3001 1928 L23940, in CSTM trade literature collection.
[34] The New Art of Buying, Preserving and Preparing Foods, pamphlet from Canadian General Electric Company, FOOD G3268 3002 1936 L31119, in CSTM trade literature collection.
[35] Nickles, “Preserving Women”, p. 698. The author discusses a report produced by the advertising agency Lord and Thomas, which Frigidaire commissioned in 1935 to survey the market and help the company understand the occurring changes in customers. The report shed light on the ongoing struggle to define the potential refrigerator market.
[36] Nickles, “Preserving Women”, p. 702.
[37] See, for instance, artefacts 1992.0811.001, 1970.0200.001, 1988.0385.001, 1992.0758.001, 1973.0122.001 in CSTM collection.
[38] Nickles, “Preserving Women”, p. 711.
[39] See designboom/portrait/loewy.html, retrieved March 25, 2013.
[40] Nickles, “Preserving Women”, pp.713-715.
[41] Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink, p. 138.
[42] Parr, Domestic Goods, 133-134.
[43] Parr, Domestic Goods, esp. Chapter 11: A Caution of Excess, pp. 243-266.
[44] Cromley, The Food Axis, 152.
[45] Gotlieb, 204.
[46] Discussed in detail by Joy Parr in Domestic Goods.
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